Summary

A look at what the science says about exercise timing:

Any movement is better than no movement - don’t let the pursuit of the perfect routine stop you from moving at all.
Morning exercise aligns with our body’s circadian biology, improving energy, metabolism and cognitive performance for the rest of the day.
Evening workouts can interfere with sleep through raised core body temperature, delayed melatonin production and late-night eating patterns.
But, an evening workout routine that you consistently stick to beats an inconsistent morning one every time.

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When I started out on my fitness journey, I used to always workout in the evenings. I’d finish work, smash out a workout in the gym and come home buzzing.

But I started noticing something. I’d struggle to wind down, eat late and then wonder why I was lying awake in bed at midnight staring at the ceiling.

I now prefer to do all my training in the morning.

I then tried something, I moved my workouts to the morning. Before this shift, I’d arrive at the office in the morning still half asleep. Now I was marching into the office full of energy, carrying a sharper focus and a calm confidence with me into the day.

And here’s why that shift had such a profound impact in levelling up my day-to-day performance. But first, there’s something important I need to mention.

Move first. Optimise later.

The single most important thing when it comes to exercise is that we do it. Any movement is better than no movement. Simple. A short walk is better than staying horizontal, scrolling on the sofa. A completed evening gym class is better than a skipped morning one.

And so, we should not create complex rules around exercise that prevent us from actually moving. We first need to first build the habit of exercise into our routines and train the skill of consistency, instead of looking to optimise something that isn’t even functional yet.

Morning takes the edge

Each morning, your body produces a natural spike in cortisol - the hormone of energy and alertness. This is good and natural. When you exercise during this window, you’re working with your physiology rather than against it. You are capitalising on this natural spike in energy and amplifying your energy levels for the rest of the day.

If you are then combining your morning movement with morning sunlight exposure (by going for a walk, or a run outside perhaps), you can stack these two powerful energy boosting habits which compound to increase wakefulness, mental acuity and improve sleep quality.

This makes sense when we think about it through the lens of evolution. We humans evolved to get to work in the morning as the sun rose. This typically involved foraging or hunting, and it is the reason why our cognitive performance (including focus, creativity and overall productivity) improves during and after exercise.

When our hunter gatherer ancestors were moving, they needed their full cognitive capacities amped up in order to track, outsmart and hopefully catch their prey. Just as our ancestors became more focused, sharp and alert during and after their hunt, we also experience an elevation in our cognitive capacities when we arrive into the office after a morning gym class.

But the advantages of morning exercise goes beyond circadian biology. Morning exercise acts as a powerful cornerstone ritual which has positive downstream effects in decision making later in the day.

You’re more likely to make healthier food choices if you exercise in the morning.

Research shows that people who exercise in the morning are more likely to make better, healthier choices throughout the day. Go for a run in the morning and you are less likely to eat Burger King for lunch.

Why? The mood and energy boost from the morning movement means you are less likely to feel that need for a “carb lift” or some “comfort food.” Plus, you’ve started the day so well with a morning workout, you wouldn’t want to blow that all out of the water with a quarter pounder and fries.

Move in the morning and we also enter the day with more confidence, than if we snoozed our alarm and scrolled in bed. Studies have shown this but we all intuitively feel it too. How much better do we feel about ourselves and our abilities after a great workout?

There’s also a practical element as well, in that it is easy to make excuses later in the day to skip your workout. Work calls run over, unexpected emails land, life happens. Move in the morning and for most of us there are less distractions, plus your brain has had less time to convince you of the myriad of reasons why you should skip today’s session.

What happens when you train in the evening

Evening exercise isn’t bad, all exercise is good. But there are some important things worth considering. When you exercise, your core body temperature rises. In the evening, your body is trying to do the opposite - cooling down to produce melatonin and prepare for sleep. An intense workout close to bedtime can delay that melatonin release, keeping us on ceiling duty long after getting into bed.

Then there’s eating. If you train later, you will likely eat later and the body ideally needs two hours to digest before bed. A well-known study from Spain on the impact of food timing on weight loss found that people who consumed the majority of their calories before 3 PM lost more weight and had much improved body composition markers as compared to the late eaters in the study - despite the same intake and activity levels across the two groups.

Regardless of whether someone’s goal is to lose weight, what this study shows in essence is that our biology and metabolism is primed in such a way that we experience powerful physiological benefits when we shift our calories to earlier in the day. And what is good for our biology, is good for our every day performance.

Something else which is often overlooked is the role that stress plays in this. If you’ve had a demanding day at work with your nervous system being in “fight or flight” mode for hours, throwing an intense evening workout in at the end of an already stressful day keeps your body in that stressed state, at exactly the time when we want it to be winding down.

And so, if you are looking to optimize your workout routine and currently workout in the evening with the opportunity to shift that to the morning, perhaps give it a go?

What if morning isn’t an option?

It is important to acknowledge here that some of us aren’t able to workout in the mornings because of perhaps kids or other commitments. Maybe we prefer the evenings or perhaps our exercise is five-a-side football with mates on a Tuesday evening.

In which case, don’t let me or anyone else get in the way of you continuing to enjoy your evening workouts!

But, if you find that you are struggling to wind down afterwards, perhaps consider some of the following:

avoiding caffeine consumption before your evening workout
leaning towards a post workout meal higher in protein and healthy fats, and lower in carbs
having a warm shower afterwards, which results in the compensatory response from your body of cooling your core body temperature

Deepen Your Curiosity

I recently discovered and am loving the physiologist Oli Patrick’s podcast ‘The Energy Equation’. This short episode has some great insights around the metrics that matter most for our health and performance.

Does Exercise Timing Matter?